Image shows a protest with people carrying yellow placards from the 2018 pensions strike
Save USS: Don't let them destroy our pension!
Emergency meeting: Friday 23rd April
Around 300 members from dozens of UCU branches attended this meeting. The first part tackled the attack on pensions, and the second part discussed organising resistance. The videos can be viewed below. Please feel free to share them.
First part of the meeting, dealing with the attack on pensions
Second part of the meeting, dealing with how we organise the fight back
UCU Solidarity Movement Statement on USS
Wednesday 7th April
Universities UK (UUK) have published their initial proposals for the future of USS: http://www.ussemployers.org.uk/sites/default/files/field/attachemnt/uss-indicative-outcome-consultation_0.pdf
These proposals include the following:
DB (defined benefits) salary threshold reduced to £40k. Currently we get DB for income up to about £60k. This would bring all but the lowest paid members into the Defined Contribution (DC) scheme, significantly reducing benefits and be a step to bringing back the DC scheme industrial action threw out in 2018.
Accrual rate reduced to 1/85 (currently 1/75) cutting the value of future pension by 12%.
Reduction in inflation proofing to 2.5%. Currently it is up to 10%. Inflation has been high in the past and could increase again. If it does our pensions could be very quickly reduced to only a fraction of their current value.
For all of their warm words and seemingly accepting UCU’s criticism of the valuation, the employers are now following USS’s lead and are attacking our pensions. Pensions are deferred pay and part of our contract of employment. We should not stand for this.
USS assets have increased to £80 billion and the scheme is able to pay current benefits from lower than current contributions for over 30 years. In their valuation, USS concocted a series of ‘lies, damned lies and statistics’ to present a sustainable and attractive pension scheme as a failing, unsustainable one.
Unless we fight it, USS and UUK are going to turn the valuation myth into a reality. Now the phoney war is over UUK have put their cards on the table. They are proposing a wholesale attack on the USS Defined Benefit (DB) scheme, worse than anything offered in 2018.
If these changes are implemented, it would end the USS Defined Benefit scheme. Members will pay more in than they will get out. They will leave en masse as the new scheme will be both unaffordable and not worth paying for and some will even leave the sector to look for better pensions elsewhere. This will create a genuine ‘death spiral’, a negative cashflow and the closure of the scheme. UUK may be hoping that this will lead to 100% DC being seen as the only alternative outcome.
We have to be prepared to fight. There are also massive equality issues. Cuts always hit casualised members and lower paid members – those in the equality streams and younger members - the hardest. UUK admit this by promoting ‘flexibility’, which in reality means an even lower-value pension offer for the lowest paid.
It is not just USS pensions under attack. Dundee University (pre-92) is threatening to close their local DB scheme for support staff, replacing it with a significantly worse DC one. At least five other post-92 universities are setting up subsidiary companies to employ new staff to avoid offering the (DB) Local Government Pension Scheme. This will also put the remaining public and private sector DB schemes at risk.
All of these changes are part of broader attempts to drive through the marketisation and privatisation of Higher Education, creating casualised pensions for an increasingly casualised workforce. We need to fight – for our own pensions and those of our colleagues and also for the pensions of the wider trade union movement.
We can and we must win
We stopped the UUK USS attack in 2018. The pension scheme survived, and members have had three more years of their pension as a result. But it took strike action to move the employers. Now industrial action will be needed again to stop the employers and USS, and to create necessary political pressure on the Government and the Pension Regulator.
Lobbying and campaigning will be necessary to complement industrial action. We will also need to negotiate but do so best from a position of strength due to industrial action. The urgent task for all of us is to prepare for strike ballots and action to defend our pensions.
Image shows a protest with people carrying a lot of yellow placards from the 2018 pensions strike